Increasing Trends in the Use of Hospital Observation Services for Older Medicare Advantage and Privately Insured Patients

Policy and financial pressures have driven up use of observation stays for patients in traditional Medicare and the Veterans’ Affairs Healthcare System. Using claims data (2004-2014) from OptumLabs™ Data Warehouse, we examined whether people in private Medicare Advantage (MA) and commercial plans experienced similar changes. We found that use of observation increased rapidly for patients in MA plans—even though MA plans were not subject to the...